One thing that bothered me slightly with the beginning of the thread...
If you're going to elongate a word to indicate a dragged-out or slurred pronunciation, some letters should be repeated and others shouldn't. If, for example, you want to say that you love someone *and* waste a good ten seconds more than necessary, you would probably drag out the 'o' and possibly add a little more of the consonants in for fun. You would not say 'love' and then follow up with an extended 'eeee' - between 'e' not being pronounced and that noise being annoying, it should be easy to see that repetition of the 'o' makes more sense than repetition of the 'e' and 'loooooove' should be used in place of 'loveeeeeeeeee'. Even when a letter is pronounced, it may not be sensible to drag it out because it simply might sound stupid - I'm not sure why 'fagz' would be dragged out *at all*, but I'm having an even harder time understanding why that word would be followed by a notable buzz unless the speaker were trying to make fun of someone with a drinking problem, a lithp, and a stustststustuttuttuter. For one last example, one might wish to sound like a burned-out hippie who has smoked his brain into a stew by elongating the word 'man' - most hippies of this sort will drag out the vowel, because even *they* realize that a buzzing 'n' doesn't sound right, and 'maaaan' - not 'mannnnnn' - should be written.
Jeff
